If super group AKB48 are idols you can see live on a daily basis, then Marshmallow 3D are idols you can cop a feel from.

Forget 3D boob games on the Nintendo 3DS! Later this month during a 24 hour telethon for an adult TV channel, you, me or anyone else can pay ¥1,000 (US$13) to fondle breasts five times. And this year, Time Out Tokyo reported, the breasts belong to idol group Marshmallow 3D.

The 3D breasts were inevitable. After Nintendo revealed its glasses-free 3D portable, the Nintendo…
Read more Read more

Idols are supposed to be pure; having a boyfriend or smoking can tick off the fans who adore these young girls, knocking them from their pedestals.

Marshmallow 3D isn't your typical idol group. It's made up of three adult film stars: Love Saotome (star of films like Car Sex Cam Vol.4), Asuka Misugi (star of Asuka Orgasm!), and Tsukushi (star of I Don't Know Anybody 2). Tsukushi has starred in multiple fetish flicks, and the group itself was put together by adult channel Paradise TV who gave the girls the band names "Vanilla", "Strawberry", and "Chocolate".

Games of leather and rubber. Not video games, but real games with impossible heels and spankings.…
Read more Read more

The event is several years in the running. For the 2008 Paradise TV telethon, website Tokyo Reporter said that famed manga artist Go Nagai even designed the official event t-shirt!

As Time Out Tokyo explained, this trio isn't the first idol group comprised of porn stars—Ebisu Muscats is made up entirely of porn stars. And several members of famous mainstream idol groups have actually dabbled in pornography. It's also not the first idol group embracing the idea that its members can get close to fans—really close. Ayaman Japan described itself as an idol group which fans can *ahem*.

Because these groups are so explicitly sexual, standard idol rules, such as being pure, go right out the window. Marshmallow 3D, though, does profess to be a "pure love" idol group—as pure as porn stars can get!

The boob fondling isn't simply a publicity stunt, but it's actually for charity. The telethon raises money for the Japanese Foundation for AIDS Prevention. With condom use down in Japan and HIV infection up, events like this attempt to raise awareness on protecting yourself and your partner.

HIV and AIDS infection rates in Japan are low, but are on the rise. "The problem is a tendency to view the issue as a foreign one, leading to the denial of an effective national solution," counsellor Abbey Freu at the AIDS Network Yokohama, a grassroots AIDS prevention group, toldInter Press. Moreover, the tendency is to focus on other diseases, leaving HIV, AIDS, and condom use by the wayside. But it's not just HIV and AIDS. This July, a Japanese researcher discovered an untreatable strain of gonorrhea in a Tokyo sex worker.

Maybe the Paradise TV event, with its skin and sexual service, comes off as crass and sleazy. But maybe, with its emphasis on condom use, it picks up the slack where traditional sex education left off. As silly as idols are and as bad as Marshmallow 3D's debut song is (pretty damn bad!), never has random strangers squeezing boobs done so much good.

(Top photo: Marshmallow 3D | Paradise TV)

Culture Smash is a daily dose of things topical, interesting and sometimes even awesome—game related and beyond.